Such acts of labeling, by assigning texts a position and a value within a system of genres, entangle them within both a synchronic web of resemblances and a diachronic history of generic “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (Deleuze and Guattari 21). A history of genre systems attentive to the power that genre attribution exercises upon distribution and reception would not be one structured primarily by the appearance of literary masterpieces, but rather one also punctuated by watersheds in the technology of publication, the distribution of reading material, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself. In the second chapter of this book I will attempt a description of the formation and topography of the mass cultural genre system within which the category of science fiction arose. But first I will turn back to the questions I raised earlier about the collective subject of SF genre formation. Those questions can now take an expanded form that should make their ramifications clearer. If SF is “whatever [in all its historical mutability and rhizomatic irregularity] we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction,” what kind of a collectivity is formed by those who recognize the genre? On what terrain—that is, what system of genres, what regime of the production and distribution of literature and literacy—does the collective endeavor of “looking for science fiction” take place? What in the economy of genres or the dynamics of distribution and reception drives that collectivity to look for SF? And what kind of intervention in that economy is their saying they have found it?
Categorization and Communities of Practice
SF history and criticism afford two drastically different versions of the collective subject of genre formation. The list of “writers, producers, distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” in Bould and Vint’s “fluid and tenuous” construction of SF indicates an anonymous, disparate, and disunified set of people. The use of Knight’s or Kincaid’s pronominal “we” here would constitute a kind of grammatical mirage imputing collective intentionality to a process without a subject—or, to be more precise, a process involving so many and such disconnected subjects that they share only the nominal common ground of their participation in the production, distribution, and reception of SF. This anonymous and scattered sense of a defining collectivity stands in sharp contrast to the practice of referring the construction and definition of SF to a rather tightly knit community, a folk group who get to say what SF is by virtue of their shared participation in the project of publishing, reading, conversing, and otherwise interacting with one another about it: “‘Modern’ science fiction, generally dated as having begun in late 1937 with the ascent of [SF editor and writer John W.] Campbell, was a literature centered around a compact group of people… There could have been no more than fifty core figures who did 90 percent of the writing and editing. All of them knew one an other, most knew one another well, lived together, married one another, collaborated, bought each others’ material, married each others’ wives, and so on” (Malzberg 240). This sort of usage has the considerable merit of making a concrete history and set of motives underlying SF refreshingly clear. Yet an excessive emphasis on the community of writers, editors, and fans in the early pulp milieu encourages an illusion of voluntary control over genre formation that is certainly exaggerated. Even during the so-called golden age of Campbell’s editorial influence, SF resided within a larger economy of genres whose shifting values and fluid boundaries no group, much less a single editor or publication, could control. Genre construction is intentional only in fits and starts, only as localized as the circulation of the narratives in question, and even then subject to the pressures of the entire system of publication and circulation in which it takes place.
Even worse, the peculiar situation of the pulps can be taken as normative for genres as such, as Gary Westfahl demonstrates in The Mechanics of Wonder: “If we define a genre as consisting of a body of texts related by a shared understanding of that genre as recorded in contemporary commentary, then a true history of science fiction as a genre must begin in 1926, at the time when Gernsback defined science fiction, offered a critical theory concerning its nature, purposes, and origins, and persuaded many others to accept and extend his ideas…. Literary genres appear in history for one reason: someone declares that a genre exists and persuades writers, publishers, readers and critics that she is correct” (8–12). If this conception of genre were correct, it could be so only with respect to modern genre practices. Certainly there is no body of contemporary commentary that illustrates a shared understanding of what constitutes the genres of the proverb, the riddle, the ballad, or the epic. But even if one stays within the field of genres occupied by Gernsback, one cannot locate a master theorist or “announcer” for the western, spy fiction, detective fiction, and so on. The more usual case with genres is surely the one described by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel, when he argues that the novel as a generic designation came to be formulated only when the process of its emergence was complete.
I suggest that it is possible to articulate the anonymous collectivity of the “complex historical process” of SF’s emergence and ongoing construction, maintenance, and revision with the rich particularity of an account like Malzberg’s by means of the theorization of categorization and its uses offered by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999). Bowker and Starr are concerned with the way classifications are constructed within communities of practice, emphasizing the ad hoc supplementation and renegotiation of official or institutional categories by those who make them work: “We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies” (293). They emphasize, too, the “collective forgetting” about “the contingent, messy work” of classification that unites members of a community of practice (299). Full-fledged membership in such a community involves the naturalization of its objects of practice, which “means stripping away the contingencies of an object’s creation and its situated nature. A naturalized object has lost its anthropological strangeness” (299). As a result of its naturalization, it can be pointed to as an example of X with an obviousness that derives not from the qualities of the object itself, but rather from membership in the relevant community.
Objects and communities of practice do not line up simply and neatly, however, because people come in and out of such communities, operate within them at various levels of familiarity with their categories, and may at the same time be members of different communities with conflicting classification practices. Bowker and Starr therefore emphasize the importance of “boundary objects” as ways of mediating the practices and motives of overlapping communities of practice: “Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them…. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities…. Boundary objects are the canonical forms of all objects in our built and natural environments” (297–307). To speak about a common ground of SF shared by writers, editors, publishers, marketers, fans, general readers, critics, and scholars might mean to identify the boundary objects that these various communities of practice share. The advantage of this conceptualization of classification is that the communities of practice do not disappear into anonymity, nor do the differences and tensions among their practices fall out of view, nor does whatever consensus settles among them embody the essence of the object. Boundary objects—for example the texts that make up the SF canon—are not by necessity the most important or definitive objects for any given community, but simply the ones that satisfy the requirements of several communities at once.
Using the concepts of communities of practice and boundary objects to sort out the complex agencies constructing SF implies at least three distinct ways of understanding the assertion that SF is “whatever we are looking for when we are looking for science fiction.” First, the “we” who are looking for science fiction could refer to the members of the speaker’s own community of practice; this is the sense it had when Damon Knight wrote that “science fiction is what we point to when we say it.” Second, however, “we” could be taken to refer to all the different communities of practice who use the category, and “science fiction” to all the objects that all of them collectively
